Andy over at Fandango Groovers puts together some really great blogathons every once in a while, and his latest is titled “My Movie Year“. I am a week late to the party, but I had to join in after seeing the great posts scattered around the blogging community. The concept is simple: select your favorite movie year and back it up with five movies to support your claim.

Now, this is actually quite the difficult question, and it has raised some interesting debates across the internet. Examples from critics include 1939, 1959, 1962, 1994 and 1999. All worthy choices, but I opted to go for a more personal route: the year 2009.

This was the year that I absolutely fell in love with film. Now, I had always enjoyed watching movies but it wasn’t until 2009 that I opened up and began indulging in anything and everything film-related. This was also my first full year living in Chicago, and there was a very cheap video store right around the corner from my first apartment in the city. Between that and Netflix, I had access to all sorts of great DVDs.

While 2009 may not be the *greatest* movie year ever, it was still a good one, and I have fond memories of many of its releases. Here are my top five, followed by some honorable mentions:

Crazy Heart

District 9

Inglourious Basterds

Up in the Air

Zombieland

Honorable mentions: (500) Days of Summer, An Education, A Serious Man, Away We Go, Best Worst Movie, Black Dynamite, Fantastic Mr. Fox, Sin Nombre, Watchmen

What is your favorite movie from 2009? Do you have any interesting movie-going memories from that year?

For a full list of participants in this blogathon, head over to Fandango Groovers.